Here are the latest national Covid-19 trends, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and major wastewater surveillance providers:
- New hospital admissions with Covid-19 have decreased 14%, from 900 admissions per day during the week ending April 13 to 800 admissions per day during the week ending April 20.
- Test positivity has decreased 12%, from 3.4% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending April 13 to 3.0% of tests during the week ending April 20.
- Healthcare visits for influenza-like illness have decreased 12% between the week ending April 13 and the week ending April 20, and these visits are below the baseline for respiratory virus season.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 17% between the week ending April 13 and the week ending April 20, and the national wastewater viral activity level is minimal, per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 12% between April 20 and April 27, per Biobot Analytics.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 5% between April 15 and April 22, per WastewaterSCAN.
The U.S.’s lull between Covid-19 surges continues, with hospitalizations for the disease reaching their lowest value in over a year — though we’re about to lose that data source. As I’ve pointed out multiple times in recent weeks, there is still a lot of SARS-CoV-2 transmission going on even when CDC maps are colored all in light green. And new variants are likely to contribute to increased spread later this spring.
Consistent with trends of the last couple of months, wastewater surveillance data from the CDC, Biobot Analytics, and WastewaterSCAN all suggest that coronavirus transmission continues to decrease, inching into a plateau. Biobot’s historical dashboard reports that current viral levels are similar to this time last year and moderately higher than this time in 2022.
Wastewater trends are also fairly consistent across the major U.S. regions, with slow declines across the board. The Northeast and Midwest report higher viral levels than the Southeast and West, but there aren’t any real hotspots jumping out right now. Per WastewaterSCAN, viral levels of flu and RSV are also declining in the country’s wastewater, matching CDC reports of declining doctors’ visits for flu-like illness.
Hospitalizations for Covid-19 similarly continue to decline, now marking two weeks with fewer than 1,000 new Covid-19 patients admitted to hospitals each day. But we’re about to lose this data source: as I noted last week, the CDC stops requiring all U.S. hospitals to report Covid-related metrics on April 30.
The agency recently added an alert to its Covid-19 dashboard, explaining that, due to the hospital reporting change, it will instead highlight numbers from a much smaller group of hospitals (about 300 in 13 states) that participate in a CDC reporting program called COVID-NET. This change brings the CDC’s Covid-19 reporting closer to its reporting for flu, which also relies on a select group of facilities to estimate national healthcare trends — even though Covid-19 consistently causes much more hospitalization, death, and chronic disease than the seasonal flu.
This is a bad time to lose one of our major Covid-19 data sources, as the U.S. is facing new variants, a warning sign for increased cases. After a winter of coronavirus transmission mostly driven by Omicron JN.1, the CDC reports that this variant is no longer the main cause of U.S. cases as it’s being outcompeted by its descendants, including variants called JN.1.7 and KP.2. A recent preprint from researches in Tokyo specifically identifies KP.2 as a variant with increased capacity to quickly infect people, suggesting it may become the dominant variant worldwide this spring.
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